‘The Death of Santini’ by Pat Conroy

In the prologue of his meandering new memoir, “The Death of Santini,” the novelist Pat Conroy says , “I’ve been writing the story of my own life for over forty years. My own stormy autobiography has been my theme, my dilemma, my obsession, and the fly-by-night dread I bring to the art of fiction.” In adding a memoir to his fiction, he joins such other family-obsessed writers as Mary Gordon and Tobias Wolff.